This is a comment on the Sept 23 postings of George McKee and
Kerry Langer.
Kerry Langer says:
"There is a fundamental divide between those who take consciousness (or
intentionality or subjectivity or meaning) to be a "real thing" in the
sense of its having some sort of intrinsic nature or "essence" and
those who regard it more as some sort of useful construct. Frankly I'm
amazed at how ready many people are to assume that intentionality is an
inner some*thing*. When Henry Stapp (21 Sep) refers to "the flow of
experience in some real physical system" or to "the subjective aspects
of nature" what does he *mean*? This is a philosophical issue which
must be addressed if progress is to be made. Against Pat Hayes he
argues that the analogy between the quest for an "elan vital" and the
quest for the nature of "the subjective" is misleading: "one *must*
examine the actual case in order to produce a solid argument". Exactly.
However in order to "examine the actual case" we need to analyse the
notion of "the subjective" (or the intentional) rather than just assume
that this is a "thing" which exists. And this is a philosophical issue.
If our concepts are just wrong and need reformulating we can only go in
the wrong direction."
Certainly I am in no way opposed to philosophy, or metaphysics in the
sense that Wm. James defined it as a particularly intense effort to
think clearly. Indeed, Klein would like to say that what I am talking
about is nothing but metaphysics. But the kind of philosophy/metaphysics
that is needed here is of a particular kind: a kind that does not
separate philosophy/metaphysics and physics into two disjoint realms.
It is of the kind that seeks to construct useful testable physical
theories that are adequately connected to what we can know.
The essence of the Einstein-Bohr debate was about the "metaphysical"
issue of how to formulate basic physical theory:
it was both physics and philosophy.
Einstein said that in his opinion:
"Physics is an attempt conceptually to grasp reality as it is thought
independently of its being observed. In this sense one speaks of
`physical reality'. In pre-quantum theory there was no doubt as to
how this was to be understood. In Newton's theory reality was determined
by a material point in space and time; in Maxwell's theory, by the
field in space and time. In quantum theory it is not so easily seen.
...."
Bohr's position was that science was about what we could know: that
in the final analysis our physical theories are, as Einstein agreed,
just inventions of the human mind that we find useful for the
organization and expansion of "our experience". There was no
disagreement on that point, which is a philosophical conclusion about
our physical theories. Einstein thought that, nevertheless, one
ought to base our basic theory on the classical concept of the
local (in spacetime) field. Bell's theorm and Aspect's
experiment has now surely shown that option to be non-viable.
Bohr thought that our experiences should be recognized as a
legitimate reality that could enter into physics theory. As a real
part of nature it would presumably have some sort of "essence",
but does not mean that it "was" *the essence*, not intertwined
with other aspects of nature in some complex interpenetrating way.
But it *was* a part of the whole reality, and hence could be taken
as a part of reality that one could build a useful physical theory
upon. This sort of analysis is "philosophical", but it is connected
to physics because it deals with the question of how a useful physical
theory can be formulated.
Of course, our experiences are surely not the totality of reality.
So one would like to have a rationally coherent theory that puts these
parts of reality into a larger cohesive theory. Heisenberg, von
Neumann, and Wigner showed how Bohr's idea could be expanded to accomplish
this.
Langer's posting begins:
"Like Anthony Goodman, I also feel compelled to ask why *any* kind of
physics should be expected to lead toward an explanation of
consciousness/subjectivity? "
But of what does an "explanation" of consciousness consist?
In what sense does `science' explain such a thing?
Scientific theories allow us to organize our experiences, and make
useful testable prediction about what we can expect to experience
in certain sorts of situations. Experiences are part of the totality
of reality. If we have an extensively tested and adequate theory that
explicitly puts our experiences into the theoretical structure in a
particular way, which is basically different from the way that
particles and fields enter, have we explained what consciousness is?
All that we have is a way of understanding how our consciousness could
fit into the rest of nature in a rationally coherent way; a way that
explains in principle why the contents of our experiences are what they
are, and how they can do what they do.
George McKee says:
"... I want to comment on the "vitalism analogy": As Henry
has pointed out, this isn't a rational argument for or against the
possibility of any theory of consciousness. What it is, is a
historical argument against the irrational confidence of those who
confidently (some might say arrogantly) assert the correctness of
their particular hypothesis."
I have given an *argument* to support my contention there is a clear
distinction between the *consciousness/subjectivity disjunction within
the framework of classical mechanics* and the other cases. This
argument is that an examination of the principles of CM shows that these
principles provide no way of passing from objective to subjective.
Confidence based on a valid argument is not irrational: rather it is
irrational to ignore a valid argument simply on the grounds that invalid
arguments for false conclusions have often been given in the past.
To repeat my earlier quote:
Einstein said that in his opinion:
"Physics is an attempt conceptually to grasp reality as it is thought
independently of its being observed. In this sense one speaks of
`physical reality'. In pre-quantum theory there was no doubt as to
how this was to be understood. In Newton's theory reality was determined
by a material point in space and time; in Maxwell's theory, by the
field in space and time. In quantum theory it is not so easily seen.
...."
The fact the Einstein could clearly see that classical mechanics
was about objective physical reality, and ceaselessly objected
to Bohr's attempt to introduce something foreign to classical
mechanics, does not mean that this (I think) universal view of physicists
about what classical physics is about is correct: one must continually
re-examine our arguments on such deep matters. But I think the only
correct way to challenge such a seemingly secure point is to look at the
arguments again. Analogies can be useful to direct us to a re-examination
of the arguments: maybe the proof of Pythagoras's theorm within the
framework of Euclidean Geometry is wrong, and some consideration might
encourage one to examine the proof anew. But once suspicions are raised
one must go back and look again to see if there was a mistake: an
argument by analogy cannot dispose of a valid proof.
The fact that Bell's theorem and Aspect's experiment effectively
prove that nature cannot have the *macroscopic* (on the scale
of meters) behaviour that classical mechanics entails, but has
rather the precise behaviour that quantum mechanics correctly predicted,
certainly dispose of Einstein's view that classical
mechanics could be, *even on a macroscopic scale*, an adequate
foundation for a conception of physical reality.
McKee says, later on:
" But what some do appear to take seriously
is that there is some nonmaterial, metaphysical C that is inside their
own heads. Stapp's position is that this C is an intrinsic part of
quantum theory, and I can accept this view of QM as an important
stage in the history of science.
But what I fail to understand is how to operate the theory to
derive how Henry Stapp or anyone who agrees with this can show that
I am conscious. "
The view of Bohr was that the experiences of the community
of communicating observers was the foundation of science. He focussed
on certain particular kinds of experiences, namely the ones that
could be characterized as experiences of " classically describable"
aspects of the world about us. He himself did not enter much into the
question of the connection of these experiences to what was happening in
our brains. But Heisenberg, von Neumann, and Wigner did so, and came to
a theory that associated our experiences that Bohr considered an
appropriate basis for physical theory with certain "events" in our brains.
These events were "collapses of the wave function of QM"
to forms compatible with our experiences. Thus our experiences became
associated with certain features of the physicist's theoretical model
of nature.
This is but a stage in the history of science: one certainly
can look forward to future changes perhaps more "radical" than this.
But this is a step beyond classical mechanics because it brings
certain aspects of reality that were not dealt with explicitly within CM
explicitly into the physical theory. It places explicitly into the
theory, in a causally efficacious role, certain elements of the
totality of reality, that were neither explicitly mentioned nor entailed
by the principles of classical mechanics, nor encompassed within what is
entailed.
How does the theory show that you are conscious?
Notice that the theory does not seek to create human consciousness from
nothing: it merely gives something known to exist, and in fact the basic
reality of our science, a place in the theoretical scheme.
Now we come to the part of the theory that still needs to be described
in more detail, and where more experimental information is needed,
to guide the working out of details. Although the general principle
that the collapse will be to a form compatible with the experience is
specified, the details are not yet fixed. But different options lead to
different behaviours, particularly as regards speed in finding
satisfactory solutions of search procedures. Once these details are in
place one would, theoretically, be in a position be to empirically determined
whether a collapse of the required kind has occurred or not in your brain.
Thus we have a theoretical framework that is not yet completely
specified, and has not yet received any direct empirical confirmation.
But it is a rationally coherent theoretical framework that does give
a generally well defined explicit place for our consciousness, and is
in principle testable, and, in contrast to CM, is at least a possible
theory that is in accord with the *macroscopic* empirical facts.
In connection with my argument that CM does not *entail*
the existence of consciousness McKee asks, in effect, what my definition
of the subjective is.
Drawing from Einstein's comment we can define the objective aspects
of nature as :
" Reality as it is thought independently of its being observed. "
That is just the sense that I used it in my argument: it is a theoretical
notion of the thought of an abstract observer that can somehow know things from
afar without actually being part of the real physical universe, or interacting
with it. The subjective/conscious/phenomenal reality is the thought of real
embodied (say human) observers that know through causally interactive
observations. The Einstein-Bohr debate was a controversy about whether the
theoretical concept of the objective, defined in this way that physicists
know and understand, and that is what classical mechanics deals with
exclusively, is adequate as a basis for physical theory, or whether a physical
theory able to accommodate adequately the empirical evidence needs
to be formulated in subjective terms, i.e., in terms of the thoughts arising in
real embodied observers from real physical acts of observation.
Classical theory might indeed be able to describe, from within the
objective framework in which it is formulated, the behavioural activities
that are associated with our conscious experiences, and it might then
be possible to augment CM by appending to it some extra principles
that would postulate this observed connection. But the principles
of CM itself can produce only prediction or conclusions that stay within
the confines of the theory: it is about "physical reality" understood as
"reality as it is thought independently of its being observed."
There is no principle within CM that allows for a leap outside this abstract
theoretical framework to one that encompasses, as QM does, the thoughts of
real observers.
Einstein thought very long and hard about these matters, and described
his conclusions clearly in the book mentioned below. I unreservedly
recommend what he has written there to anyone interested in these questions.
Henry P.Stapp
Ref: Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist. Tudor, New York. 1952
ed. P.A. Schilpp. p. 81.